University of Pennsylvania
ScholarlyCommons
Departmental Papers (Classical Studies)
Classical Studies at Penn
March 1992
Review of Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of
Comedy. Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis
Ralph M. Rosen
University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers
Recommended Citation
Rosen, R. M. (1992). Review of Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy. Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis. Retrieved from
http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/22
Reprinted from Bryn Mawr Classical Review, March 1, 1991. Publisher URL: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1992/03.02.13.html
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/22
For more information, please contact [email protected].
Review of Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy. Aristophanes and the
Intertextual Parabasis
Abstract
Few formal elements of Old Comedy have troubled scholars as much as the parabasis. In its typical form, this
choral "digression" appears to interrupt the dramatic fiction of the play with commentary on contemporary
social or political issues and often brazen trumpeting of the poet's virtues. Its apparent discontinuity with the
rest of the play encouraged scholars of an earlier age to consider it the original kernel of Comedy onto which
dramatic episodes were eventually grafted.
Comments
Reprinted from Bryn Mawr Classical Review, March 1, 1991. Publisher URL: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/
bmcr/1992/03.02.13.html
This review is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/22
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.02.13
Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy. Aristophanes and the
Intertextual Parabasis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Pp. xii + 284. ISBN 0-8014-2564-6.
Reviewed by Ralph M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania.
Few formal elements of Old Comedy have troubled scholars as much as the parabasis. In
its typical form, this choral "digression" appears to interrupt the dramatic fiction of the
play with commentary on contemporary social or political issues and often brazen
trumpeting of the poet's virtues. Its apparent discontinuity with the rest of the play
encouraged scholars of an earlier age to consider it the original kernel of Comedy onto
which dramatic episodes were eventually grafted. Theories multiplied about its original
location in the play, as well as about its function and morphology, but there was general
consensus that the parabasis was something quite distinct from and fundamentally
irrelevant to the rest of the play. More recently, however, some have argued that,
whatever its actual origins, Aristophanes and his colleagues employed the parabasis as a
literary device well integrated into the larger fabric of the play. Although many examples
of this approach can be found here and there scattered in the scholarly literature of the
past few decades, Hubbard's book is the first attempt to examine all the Aristophanic
parabases synoptically,1 and to consider in particular how each functions both in its
localized context and in the context of the poet's entire corpus.
Hubbard maintains not only that the parabases reflect central concerns of the plays in
which they occur, but, more importantly, that when taken together they can be seen to
present a developing autobiographical narrative: "Each ... parabasis encapsulates an
overview of the poet's entire career and thus relates his intentions in the present play to
those of earlier works and of his dramatic oeuvre as a whole." (p. 31). Self-presentation
of the poet, of course, is a traditional and self-evident feature of the parabasis. But it is
Hubbard's focus on the persistent intertextuality of all the Aristophanic parabases that
makes his approach seem so promising, especially since, more so than in any other genre
of the period, the self-referential and self-critical mode was built into Old Comedy. For
Hubbard, intertextual allusions "function not merely as cross-references reminding us of
a previous text but as significant evocations incorporating and transforming the context
and meaning of those prior texts; at the same time they add a dimension of meaning to
the alluding text, not present in the words and motifs when taken in isolation" (p. 40).
Obviously, distinguishing what is a "significant evocation," or even, for that matter,
deciding what are bona fide "cross-references" in poetic works are critical tasks fraught
with controversy and uncertainty, and no one working in this area can expect to satisfy all
readers. Although Hubbard's zealous attempt to produce a coherent and comprehensive
account of parabatic intertextuality does occasionally gives rise to tendentious
argumentation, just as often his discussions, particularly when focused on individual
passages, are subtle, judicious, and persuasive.
The first two chapters, "Comedy and Self-Knowledge" and "The Intertextual Parabasis,"
discuss the parabasis as a locus of self-referential humor in which the poet can create for
himself a comic persona which "undergoes continuous modulation and revision from
parabasis to parabasis" (p. 29). Hubbard dismisses, as others have done, the various
theories about where the parabasis came from (e.g., from the epirrhematic syzygy? the
original choral parodos? from cultic aischrologia?) on the grounds that our evidence is
simply insufficient or contradictory. But while his aporia on the question of origins is
essentially prudent (the search for a single provenance of the parabasis is surely quixotic),
it is disappointing that he doesn't evaluate in greater detail how reasonably well attested
antecedent elements of the parabasis (lyric self-reference, iambographic posturing, the
archaic didactic stance, for example) might have influenced its shape by the late fifth
century. Hubbard's view that the parabasis was "fundamentally a product of selfconscious literary evolution with distinctly literary purposes" is certainly sound, but it
does have the effect of downplaying the delicate interaction of poetic convention, cultural
praxis and a poet's conscious hand. Hubbard rejects, for example, the notion that the
parabasis was a "cultic remnant," but his categorical repudiation (p. 25) of this view
curtails any investigation of the cultic elements that at some level did help shape the
parabasis (and other parts of Old Comedy). The observation that "we do not find [cultic
aischrology] in every parabasis and the parabasis is far from being the only place in
Comedy where we do find it" is hardly grounds for rejecting altogether the influence of
the cults on the parabasis. It may be that our evidence for such matters is inconclusive,
but no more so than the evidence adduced to argue that the parabasis was a fifth-century
literary innovation.
Hubbard's principal concern, of course, is the Aristophanic parabasis, and he proceeds to
take up each play in chronological order up to the Frogs, the last play to feature one. He
rehearses a good deal of familiar material here, no doubt with a non-specialist audience in
mind; still a little less descriptive "plot summary" would have profitably tightened his
argument. In these chapters Hubbard does not offer any especially novel interpretations
of individual parabases. His contribution lies rather in viewing them synoptically and
arguing that their interplay with one another and with other comic texts (i.e. their
intertextuality) allows us to trace an evolving autobiography of the poet.
The early parabases, he argues, show a poet obsessed with his alleged dealings with
Cleon, and more generally with justifying his art to a sometimes unappreciative audience.
This much is hardly new in itself, though in each case Hubbard succeeds nicely in
showing how Aristophanes sets up a "parallelism between the poet's glorified persona
and major characters involved in the dramatic action of each play" (p. 220). In
Acharnians, for example, the "poet's" self-defense against Cleon in the parabasis is
mirrored by Dicaeopolis' later attempt to make his own case heard by putting his head on
the chopping block. The fact that Dicaeopolis "becomes" Aristophanes earlier in the play,
and appropriates on behalf of the poet a quarrel that doesn't really concern him (377-84),
is played out later when Dicaeopolis feels compelled to plead his own case in the guise of
the Euripidean Telephus. Like this disguised Dicaeopolis, Aristophanes too has evidently
disguised his real identity by having Callistratus produce the play. Hubbard's discussion
of the constantly shifting masks of Dicaeopolis and their importance for creating a selfportrait of the poet is elegant, and his notion that the parabasis of Acharnians in effect
serves as a focal point where the layers of irony and masquerade in the plot are
deconstructed, is persuasively set forth.
In a similar fashion the parabasis of Knights, which situates Aristophanes in the poetic
rivalries of the day, finds its dramatic counterpart, according to Hubbard, in the political
rivalry between the Sausage seller and the Paphlagonian (Cleon). Just as the Sausage
seller gradually warms up to the fight against Cleon during the course of the play, so the
parabasis reflects the poet's own growing self-confidence in confronting Cleon on his
own, without the protection of a producer.
Hubbard's discussion of Clouds in Chapter 5 highlights well the anxieties Aristophanes
seems to have felt as he tried to compose an "intellectual" comedy that satirized current
intellectual trends. Hubbard sees the failure of the first version of the play as a pivotal
trauma in the poet's career, which largely informed the parabasis of the second version
that we now possess. In this parabasis, the poet quite transparently identified himself with
his own portrayal of Socrates: "Socrates and Aristophanes are both educators of the
Athenian public, although each exercises his didactic leadership in different ways. And
both are misunderstood by the general public" (p. 95). The parallelism between Socrates
and Aristophanes in the play is easy to endorse, but Hubbard also finds an important
contrast between the two: "Aristophanes differs from Socrates in that there is a moral
dimension to his SOFI/A; his comedy is not only SOFO/S, but also SW/FRWN (vv. 529,
537)... On the other hand Socratic education, at least as presented in this play, seems to
be a godless mechanism completely devoid of moral considerations or concerns with
traditional values" (pp. 95-96). But Hubbard risks here, it seems, undermining the very
parallelism that he is at pains to emphasize. For if Socrates is, like Aristophanes, a
misunderstood intellectual, then we might easily argue (as I think we should) that his
alleged godlessness and lack of social responsibility arise also from a misunderstanding
by the public at large. Seen in this light, the Socrates of the Clouds is the Socrates of
Strepsiades' imagination, i.e., the Socrates that existed in the minds of many unreflective
and untutored Athenians. Martha Nussbaum has argued (YCS 1980) along these lines that
the play dramatizes the dangers of Socrates' uncontrolled and indiscriminate elenchus.
But where Nussbaum saw the play as a serious critique of Socratic methodology,
Hubbard sees it as a critique of the very moral foundation of Socratic philosophy itself.
The perennial question resurfaces: did Aristophanes have any real understanding of what
Socrates was up to? Hubbard's argument, which has Aristophanes identify the historical
Socrates with the immoral practices endorsed by the Lesser Logos, would seem to answer
no. But his own compelling discussion of Socrates and Aristophanes as kindred spirits
leads me now to regard their kinship as a guiding theme of the entire play, including the
disquieting final scene in which Strepsiades burns the phrontisterion. Of this scene
Hubbard states (p. 112): "The vigorous affirmation of life which we expect in a comedy
is here submerged in the ironic gloom of intellectual despair, whether of the disappointed
poet or his negative alter ego, the ill-tempered philosopher." If, however, the play really
is a critique of the "ill-tempered" philosopher, the "gloom of intellectual despair"
becomes rather (as others have claimed) a ray of hope, as "traditional" good
unambiguously triumphs over "contemporary" evil. But I think Hubbard is absolutely
right: there is an enormous sense of gloom at the end of Clouds, and the play does
question "the position of the intellectual in society" (p. 112). Only it stems precisely from
the fact that Socrates too has been misunderstood (just as Aristophanes complains in the
parabasis that he himself has been misunderstood), and the conflagration at the end of the
play dramatizes the dangers faced by both the philosopher and the intellectual comic poet
when they confront an unpredictable public. Ironically, this is a reading that I owe largely
to Hubbard's discussion the play, but which he evidently would not endorse.
In the parabasis of Wasps, Aristophanes is still smarting from the defeat of Clouds, and
so, according to Hubbard, he proceeds to revaluate "his developing aims and methods as
a comic poet" (p.113). Indeed, Hubbard sees the whole play as a recapitulation of the
poet's entire dramatic career to date (p. 126). In the first half of the play "we see the
young reformer Bdelycleon succeed in his explicitly political program, like Aristophanes,
his alter ego, who won dramatic victories with his political plays." The second half of the
play after the parabasis "is devoted not so much to the political reform of Philocleon as to
his social and cultural education" which, he argues, evoke the "social and and intellectual
critique in Aristophanes' most subtle play, the Clouds. And like the Clouds, Bdelycleon's
attempt to reeducate his father is a total failure." The parabasis, then, functions as a
"hermeneutic key to the structure of the Wasps, which is itself a recapitulation of the
poet's past career" (p. 126).
In many ways the chapter on Wasps is emblematic of both the virtues and the pitfalls of
Hubbard's entire approach to Aristophanes. His discussion of how the parabasis in this
play serves as a kind of pivot between the two plots is elegant and persuasive, as is his
general argument that the poet intended the entire play (i.e. not only the parabasis, with
its well-recognized traditional programmatic concerns) to be considered with his previous
work in mind. Some of the details of Hubbard's argument, however, beg questions about
the mechanism of what he considers "intertextuality." Consider the following
representative quotations: "The idea that political leaders like Cleon keep the public
impoverished in order to manipulate it better ... is clearly derived from the Sausage
Seller's critique of Paphlagon in the Knights" (p. 129), or "the idea for Labes' theft of
cheese from the kitchen and for Cleon's characterization as a dog comes from the rival
dog oracles presented in the Knights" (pp. 130-31, italics added in both quotations).
Hubbard never really makes it clear just how exactly he envisions these forms of
intertextuality coming into being. It seems at any rate as if he would consider these cases
as old-fashioned intentional "allusions," with the poet fully conscious at every stage of
the intertextual process. The problem is, however, that in very few of these cases can we
say with any certainty that the intertextuality must be fully intentional. Often Hubbard
does persuade us that Aristophanes probably was in full control of his allusions in any
given passage, but his relentlessly biographical approach, which seeks at every turn to
discover an overarching, conscious poetic program throughout the plays, leaves out of
discussion a whole host of other factors that must have influenced their final contour.
There is little sustained attention, for example, to conventional material in Comedy, to the
constraints and dictates of genre, or to how we should even formulate the very concept of
allusion in a culture hovering between orality and literacy.
Hubbard does acknowledge that some of his arguments for intertextuality are necessarily
imprecise. His argument for the chronological priority of Lysistrata over
Thesmophoriazusae depends largely on a particular sense of how the later text alludes to
the earlier, and he does recognize that "to some extent the judgment of priority is
subjective," since one can always argue that what he identifies as a "cross-reference" to
an earlier text, is in fact an anticipation of the later one (p. 199). Indeed the whole
discussion of Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae points up an interesting methodological
tension that pervades much of the book. The discussion centers on a traditional problem
of relative dating, and in answering this sort of positivistic question, Hubbard appears to
use "intertextuality" as a dressed up term for "allusion" in the traditional sense: "passage
y alludes to passage x, therefore passage x was written before passage y." Curiously, I
found it easy to object to many of Hubbard's arguments when he wanted to invoke them
as evidence for chronological priority, but when I ignored the larger project of relative
dating, I found his discussion of the intertextuality of the plays of 411 to be quite subtle
and compelling. When fettered by a concern for empirical facts about a text, it is difficult
to appreciate fully what distinguishes "intertextuality" (as a kind of reciprocal interplay
among texts) from its more limited subspecies "allusion."
For similar reasons, Hubbard's overall approach in the book presents something of a
dilemma. Fundamentally, he is constructing a very detailed biography of Aristophanes.
Every play, at least up to Frogs, is related intimately to the previous one, and represents
another discernible point in the poet's developing career. The last chapter of the book
(Chap. 9) summarizes how Hubbard extrapolates this career from the plays he has
discussed, but he is never quite clear (nor is he in the rest of the book) about the precise
nature of this autobiography. At times, he speaks of a comic "persona," which leads one
to suspect that after all he is less concerned with Aristophanes "the man" than with
Aristophanes "the fiction of the plays." But most of the time Hubbard's rhetoric suggests
that his project is to uncover a real flesh-and-blood personality. A case in point that
reveals Hubbard's own ambivalence about the issue is his attitude towards Aristophanes'
relationship with Cleon. Hubbard says of the Acharnians, for example, that "the
interpenetration between dramatic fantasy and political reality is so well developed that
we cannot at any moment assert with certainty which of the two realms is referred to" (p.
46), but in a footnote to this sentence he insists that there was a historical conflict
between Cleon and Aristophanes, reasoning simply that the alleged conflict appears so
insistently in the Acharnians that it "must have had some basis in reality" (p. 46 n.18). At
the end of the chapter, he hedges again: "Cleon's 'lawsuit' (or whatever it was) against the
comic poet was a historical, civic event, but is here transformed into a dramatic event
through its appropriation by the character Dicaeopolis who speaks of it as a lawsuit
against himself" (p. 59). In another context, Hubbard accurately notes that "the various
poses and masks of Aristophanes' persona are to a large degree conventional" (p. 32), and
in speaking of another of Aristophanes' autobiographical claims, the claim to poetic
originality, Hubbard can say that "there was nothing less original than the claim of comic
originality. The parabasis is in its very essence grounded in an atmosphere of developed
agonistic competition and intense literary allusion, wherein the poets sought and created
for themselves visible public identities" (p. 33). But clearly one can equally say that there
is nothing less unusual in Old Comedy than a poet claiming to have bêtes-noires. Just
when Hubbard seems to be moving in the direction of explaining Aristophanes'
relationship with Cleon in terms of a fictional self-presentation, he reverts to an
apparently historical model of explanation. The last sentence of the book highlights the
confusion on this issue: "Behind the mask of Aristophanes one finds many masks, but
this is not to say that there is not at the same time also a real man there with real views
and with all the complex contradictions which thoughtful and generally funny human
beings possess" (p. 225). This would be a fine conclusion to the book if Hubbard had
been able to distinguish more clearly throughout how he differentiates the masks from
reality (as indeed we had been promised in the Preface, p. ix, where he states the need for
a "refined synthesis of the social and biographical approaches that treats the work as a
confrontation or nexus between the author and society ... and articulat[es] the dynamic
tension between social demands and authorial intentionality.")
The dangers of Hubbard's attempt to construct a systematic biography of Aristophanes
from the plays is well illustrated by his discussion of the end of the Frogs (pp. 214-19).
Here, the yearning for a clear-cut, dogmatic explanation of extremely ambiguous material
that the biographical approach fosters is especially evident. In interpreting the final scene
of the play in which Dionysus decides to bring back Aeschylus rather than Euripides
from Hades, Hubbard essentially identifies Dionysus with Aristophanes: "Dionysus
ultimately expresses the poet's view in saying that Aeschylus again has spoken 'wisely' ...,
Euripides 'clearly'" (p. 215). From this identification, Hubbard is able to view the entire
play as a sort of poetic manifesto which has Aristophanes embracing the best elements of
each tragedian (Aeschylus' "fantastic imagination and moral purpose ... Euripides'
everyday realism without the moral indifference," p. 218), but ultimately repudiating
Euripidean poetry because "it has lost all sense of poetic presence, that is, the notion of
the poet having a special relationship with his audience" (p. 217), and is thus morally
bankrupt. Hubbard's whole discussion here, however, resolves too neatly the very
palpable tensions, equivocations, and ambiguities that make the play so provocative and
slippery. Hubbard's conclusion, for instance, that Aeschylus' and Euripides' respective
advice about Alcibiades and the current governance of the polis reveals Aristophanes'
fundamental conservative, aristocratic leanings seems too simplistic. He argues (p. 215)
that because Aeschylus asks specifically about the moral quality of contemporary leaders
while Euripides' "interest seems rather to be in continually using new men for the sake of
using new men," the former's advice is intellectually sound (if impractical) while the
latter's is morally deficient. But the term Hubbard stresses for Aeschylus' notion of
morally "good" (v. 1455; and cf. v. 735, in the parabasis), namely XRHSTO/S, is hardly
unambiguous, connoting just as readily and perhaps even primarily, "useful." Hubbard
states of Euripides' advice (p. 216) that "it is not sound or intelligent advice to tell the city
that it should simply do 'the opposite' (v. 1450) of what it is doing, if it is currently
having problems." But this assumes unfairly that Euripides will have given no thought to
why the city should do the opposite, and presumes that Aeschylus' advice amounts to
something more than the unreflective conservatism that it can easily be seen to be.
Hubbard is aware that Euripides professes, like Aeschylus, to be concerned for the
"betterment of the citizens" (p. 216), but charges him with being "unconcerned with the
effects of his plays on the audience." One could just as easily, however, interpret the play
as blaming the audience for failing to appreciate exactly what Euripides' moral program
was, and for preferring Aeschylus' familiar appeals to a nostalgic form of patriotism to
Euripides' intellectual discourse.
Hubbard also makes the Havelockian argument that Euripides' notorious bookishness,
especially prominent in the Frogs, reflected a disturbing trend away from living
performance toward a growing text-based culture, and that this resulted in a diminution of
a play's didactic force; hence the preference for Aeschylus in the end. This is indeed half
the picture -- Aeschylus, for example, does ridicule Euripides and his coterie of scribes -but it suppresses the fact that Euripides too presents himself as a didactic poet. As texts
are disseminated, read, and reread, it is true that "the poet is removed one step further
from his audience" (p. 217), but it was a hallmark of Euripides' general intellectual
orientation to prefer discourse and debate to the self-righteous pontificating of the
Aristophanic Aeschylus. The end of the Frogs may imply that the Athenian audience was
not quite ready for the philosophical ambiguities and uncertainties of Euripidean drama,
or for the desacralization of the poet that accompanied the rise of literacy, but we need
not conclude, as Hubbard does, that Aristophanes himself advocated categorically one
side of the argument or the other. Hubbard does not sufficently consider the significance
of the fact that the ultimate choice of Aeschylus at the end is set up as something of a
paraprosdokian, that Dionysus, who makes the choice, is an amalgamation of conflicting
character-types, and that neither Aeschylus nor Euripides is portrayed univocally in the
agon. Hubbard's tendency here, and throughout the book, is to isolate the salient issues of
an Aristophanic play, and then attempt to align the poet himself with a particular
viewpoint. This procedure, it seems to me (and glaringly so in the case of the Frogs),
often robs the work of subtleties, ambiguities and contradictions that a less rigidly
conceived reading might encourage.
New books about Aristophanes appear far less frequently than books about most other
canonical classical authors, so any contribution as serious and as ambitious as this one
not only is likely to receive especially close scrutiny but deserves a warm welcome as
well. The paucity of such books reflects not so much scholarly indifference as the
extreme difficulty of saying anything cogent about such a particularly elusive subject as
comedy. Despite my disagreements with Hubbard on a number of issues, The Mask of
Comedy is always intelligent, provocative, and engaging, and will certainly become an
important focal point for future studies of Aristophanes and the comic parabasis.
NOTES
• [1] G. M. Sifakis' Parabasis and Animal Choruses (London 1971) still remains the best
descriptive account of the parabasis in Old Comedy, although his view that the parabasis
(like all the scenes of Old Comedy) was essentially a self-contained and disconnected
dramatic unit, runs counter to Hubbard's approach.